*Participants*

Bob Morgan -- Washington (chair)
Scott Cantor -- OSU
Steven Carmody -- Brown
Renee Frost -- Michigan/Internet2
Michael Gettes -- Duke
Brian Gilmore -- Edinburgh
Keith Hazelton -- Wisconsin
Paul Hill -- MIT
Jim Jokl -- Virginia
Ken Klingenstein -- Colorado/Internet2
Diego Lopez -- RedIRIS
Neal McBurnett -- Internet2
Ton Verschuren -- SURFnet
David Wasley -- UCOP
Nate Klingenstein -- Internet2 (scribe)

*Discussion*

Todd Needham of Microsoft has written a glowing note following the member meeting expressing his happiness that there is now an organization where Microsoft can regularly turn to for opinions of the university community.

Signet

The Internet2 Spring Member Meeting went off very successfully, with the introduction of the Signet activity to the membership. While it remains in an odd state because it isn't yet a proper working group with a charter and a chair, Bob reported that "one often-hard-to-please person said he would be happy to install it to replace his current stuff once it shows up, so it's in particular demand." There is an informal search process ongoing for more formal testbed sites, and a continuation of lining up the details of Stanford's contribution.
When presented with curiosity about whether Signet would evolve to handle broader problems in a cohesive fashion, such as mailing list software, Bob replied that "providing a focus to make sure existing packages do the right thing is the point, and [he's] not worried about holding that line."

I2IM

Ton broached the issue about whether I2IM is "going anywhere." Michael replied that he believes it is trying, albeit slowly, to understand what if anything can be done in that space. His understanding is that Lionshare has an interest in federated instant messaging, and Brendan Bellina of Notre Dame is working on a set of use cases to be massaged into scenarios. Ton thought taking a step back might be valuable to find a niche in which there are services or capabilities that can't be performed by dominant platforms such as MSN Messenger. Bob also wonders about potential ties to Chandler, given that their vague plans at one time included Jabber as both a messaging platform and an actual IM service.

Mozilla & OKI

The Mozilla platform has evolved beyond being a simple web browser, beyond a group of applications, and is now being pitched as a foundation for doing fundamentally new and cool things with their underlying architecture, engines, and libraries. The MACE dinner at the member meeting resulted in a general sense of opportunities to be pursued in terms of co-operation between Mozilla and Internet2 as a whole. Michael sent out a set of conversation items and Ken has been doing some strategic thinking; there will hopefully be more direction set by the next CSG meeting.
Everyone deals with distributed apps all the time; clearly, OKI isn't intended to be just a set of interfaces on various sides, client, server, etc. Instead, it is expected to contain, in Steven's words, "all that ugly code you commonly associate with drivers.... The app doesn't need to know what goes on in there, but it's like a sausage factory." He had expected something positioned instead as a generalized set of interfaces to be used on either side of the network. The OKI interfaces may not be as useful unless there is a bunch of what they call "out of band agreements" -- which Steven interprets as "traditional architecture."
Scott generalized this: "there's at least as much work explaining to people what you think this is good for as there is in designing it in the first place and building it."

Apps & Cyber-Infrastructure

SALSA has been formed as a sister group to MACE serving as an advisory council for network security. However, there is no place for network management people to convene in a similar fashion to these two bodies. Internet2 needs to decide whether they want to act as a flywheel/facilitator in local cyberinfrastructure and enterprise research computing.
Ken consulted Jim Bruce after the MACE, SALSA, and Mozilla dinner to point out that Internet2's applications division had always focused on high-end, ambitious opportunities. There may be a more fundamental need within the community for infrastructural applications, or things like ePortfolio in which there is no interest of the commercial sector. The application strategy council will be a useful resource.
The least common denominator of the opportunities would probably be creation of a working group to focus on application platforms. There have been conversations with Ben Teitelbaum of Internet2 surrounding whether any of these presents a suitable environment for compliant SIP, for example.

Shibboleth Updates

Scott was invited to speak at the Catalyst meeting hosted by the Burton Group. When asked about the focus they wanted, while Scott thought they might want "Shib as Seen by an End User", they instead wanted a talk on the state of Shibboleth. There is also expected conversation about the state of standards and how Shibboleth is influencing the development of SAML 2.0, and to what extent SAML's features are used by Shibboleth. There may also be pointed questions, such as whether this is a candidate for companies who want open-source Liberty Alliance.
At the time of the call, the JISC awards had not been announced, but they have subsequently been sent on to MACE by Brian. A great number of these awards include the use of Shibboleth in various settings and architectures.
There may also be some of the momentum and progress generated by Shibboleth towards the development of federated trust fabrics that can be harnessed by PKI. There may be some deviation from the traditional top-down structure of PKI to match the trust structure, but it could evolve there as requirements necessitate and deployments mature. Tim Polk and Peter Alterman of the Federal efforts have expressed their eagerness to accommodate any ideas higher ed may generate.